The Queen of Dirt Island by Donal Ryan: Full of heart and spark but with a self-imposed problem

The new novel by Donal Ryan is so unusual — eccentric and experimental, dramatic and emotional, funny and bizarre — that it’s hard to know where to begin in describing it. But let’s start where he always does: with the people.

The Queen of Dirt Island tells the stories of four generations of women over 3½ decades in the town of Nenagh, Co Tipperary, running from 1983 to the day before yesterday. But at the start of the book there are only three women: grandmother Nana, mother Eileen (Nana’s daughter-in-law), and Eileen’s daughter Saoirse, who is born on the first line of the first chapter, and whose father dies in a car crash on the next page. It’s that sort of book.

This leaves Mary and Eileen and Saoirse alone together, a three-part defensive unit, dedicated to looking out for one another. But with birth and death the relatives come out of the woodwork, and soon we meet the dead man’s brothers, Paudie and Chris, “one a jailbird and the other a simpleton”. Chris proposes unsuccessfully to Eileen — his late brother’s widow — while Paudie gets into the first of a couple of stints of jail time for hiding weapons.

Still, Paudie’s reputation stands Saoirse in good credit with one of her classmates when she’s older, who wants to meet Paudie (“he’s nearly forty,” says Saoirse) to “talk to him, ask him about his struggle and, you know, stuff”. Typically for Ryan, this uneasy comedy comes juxtaposed with pure darkness, as the girl who wants to meet Paudie is the Baudelaire-quoting, self-dramatising Breedie Flynn, victim of scurrilous school graffiti (“Breedie Flynn rides her da”) and the target of a tragic end.

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Enough already? But we’re only a quarter of the way through the book, with plenty more surprises, hairpins and revelations to come

Then there’s Richard, Eileen’s brother, who is in dispute with her over the land of their home — Eileen is the self-styled Queen of Dirt Island, the place thus named by the “envy and spite” of the locals who resented the success the family made of their bit of land. Or there’s Eileen’s father, who turns up one day “dressed all in black”, demanding to see his granddaughter Saoirse; or interfering busybodies such as Concepta Quirke, who reports Eileen to the authorities for child neglect.

Enough already? But we’re only a quarter of the way through the book, with plenty more surprises, hairpins and revelations to come. It’s a family story, and families don’t have single plot lines, but as we go through, it becomes increasingly clear that Saoirse is the heart of the book. In some respects, the story involves her discovering more and more family members and other connections she didn’t know she had, most of whom have no good news to deliver. (“Your mother broke our parents’ hearts. She’s a whore. Do you know what that is?”)

And then, midway through, after Saoirse has become a mother herself at the age of 17 — her daughter, the fourth generation, is named Pearl — the ground shifts again. Ryan brings outsiders into the Nenagh community: though “outsiders” may not be the word, given that the key arrivals are Josh and Honey from his previous novel, Strange Flowers.

This crossing of the beams has a detrimental effect on the book. Ryan sets up a metafictional conceit whereby Saoirse makes notes about her family and Josh writes it up into a novel called — you guessed — The Queen of Dirt Island. It’s a complication too far, particularly given the regular drumbeat of deaths, haemorrhages, stranglings and other dramatic scene-stealers that continue to punctuate the pages.

These structural deficits are a shame, as stylistically, Ryan’s game is often as strong as ever

It’s this regularity that’s part of the problem. For reasons unclear, Ryan has set himself an artificial restraint with The Queen of Dirt Island — each chapter is precisely 500 words long, and takes up two pages. This sort of restraint is the province of the French Oulipo school of writing: it’s a method of limiting how you write in order to discover what it is possible to say.

The problem is that once Ryan has decided that each chapter must have exactly the same word count, all scenes must fit that length, whether or not that violates the natural rhythm of the story. So some sections feel too brisk at the two-page limit, others a little padded, and there are too many dramatic revelations altogether, particularly in a novel that squeezes about 35 years into fewer than 250 pages.

These structural deficits are a shame, as stylistically, Ryan’s game is often as strong as ever, with plenty of sparky dialogue (“Whatever he was at inside me he made a pure hames of my pipework,” complains Nana of her final pregnancy with Chris). And the heart that marks his work is present and correct, in a story of family where all the women want the others to be happy, but nobody is quite sure how. But then “happiness”, as Saoirse reflects, “was a strange notion”.